Friday, December 19, 2008

Purity-testing candidates

Starchild, you can get an 80/80 on the WSPQ and still favor protectionism, military empire, conscription, farm subsidies, public schools, helmet laws, gun control, a living wage, monopoly fiat currency, universal healthcare, banning all abortions, establishment of religion, and estate taxes. If you're going to purity-test candidates, you should use the interactive higher-precision (yet more compact) test at http://libertarianmajority.net/. It limits you to at best a 50/30 if you have all the views I just mentioned.

The mailing Allen mentioned sounded like an admirable effort to cast a wider net looking for potential Libertarian candidates. Non-libertarians who mis-register (for whatever reason) are very unlikely to be interested in running for office as a Libertarian, and I've never heard of a problem candidacy of this sort.

Allen, only a tiny fraction of voters look at resumes of candidates for partisan office. The rest let the parties do that. I gave you two well-controlled experiments in which varying party label for a fixed resume moves the needle by 20 percentage points, whereas varying resume for a fixed party label moves the needle by 0.1 percentage point. That's two orders of magnitude difference. Social science very rarely gets that good. :-)

Resume/experience isn't even the next-most important factor after party label. The next would be money and its equivalent in name recognition or media access. Resume/experience is most important only in non-partisan races with rough funding parity (which is most of the competitive ones). Resume/experience is indeed crucial to your farm-team vision, but it is not the explanation why Libertarians lose partisan races. (The image of the LP isn't the explanation either. I bet 90% of voters have no impression or knowledge of the LP one way or the other. The LP's image is more important among opinion-shapers than among voters, and we need to keep repairing our image among opinion-shapers even as we reach past them to all those voters who have never heard of us.)